Category Archives: War

Nord Stream Sabotage Backfires With Historic Demolition of U.S. Image and Lies Over Ukraine War, by The Strategic Culture Editorial Board

The U.S. will lose far more than whatever it hoped to gain from blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline. From The Strategic Curlture Editorial Board at strategic-culture.org:

Washington is a war-criminal state par excellence along with its European Quislings.

The Hersh report is a devastating revelation of U.S. and NATO international terrorism as well as Western media complicity. It exposes the lawlessness of U.S. government, the total disregard by Washington for its so-called European allies, the supine nature of European governments, Germany in particular, and the real geopolitical reasons behind the war in Ukraine, and subsequently the shocking servility of Western media in refusing to cover what is an astounding act of criminality.

This is an explosive story in more ways than one and indeed in more ways than we can perhaps even calculate at this stage. Only one week after its publication, the fallout and reverberations continue to amplify. Such is the parlous and pathetic state of Western journalism, Hersh was obliged to publish his account on his resources, knowing that mainstream outlets would not touch it. That systematic media censorship and exposure of propaganda functioning is itself a huge scandal that will grow further. This is while the European Union sanctions and bans Russian media, even though Russian media have been vindicated by Hersh’s revelations while Western media is shown to be an utter disgrace.

On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. European states have since acknowledged that, albeit with muted reports. For its part, Russia has from the outset blamed Western powers for an act of terrorism. Washington initially made the preposterous claims that Russia had carried out the attacks in revenge against Europe. And Western media went along with the ridiculous ride.

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Oh lightning, I command thee to smite my foe! By James Howard Kunstler

Russia is going to win in Ukraine, but it must do so in a way that doesn’t provoke the U.S. into doing something stupid, like a nuclear strike. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“When we see a completely insane public policy which has become a universal dogma — such as liberal internationalism in postwar US foreign policy — we are usually looking at the rotten, ossified ghost of a strategy which in its youth was sane and effective.” — Curtis Yarvin, The Gray Mirror

     After Commander-in-Chief (ahem) “Joe Biden” demonstrated our ability to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon leisurely wandering the jet stream clear across North America, he loosed the Air Force on every other menacing aerial object hovering in our sovereign skies and… Ira Tonitrus… mission accomplished! It took the President another week to admit sheepishly that the three other targets were “most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions,” not alien invaders from another galaxy, as regime spoxes hinted and the news media played-up for days. Note to America’s hot air ballooning community for the upcoming spring launch season: be very afraid!

     If Russia was impressed by the successful balloon op, it didn’t offer any comment. Russia was busy neutralizing America’s pet proxy palooka, sad-sack Ukraine, sent into the ring to soften-up Russia for a revolution aimed at overthrowing the wicked Vlad Putin — at least according to our real Secretary of State (and Ukraine war show-runner), Victoria Nuland, in remarks this week to the Carnegie Endowment, a DC think tank.

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NATO Chief Admits: “War Didn’t Start In February Last Year, The War Started In 2014”, by Tyler Durden

Vladimir Putin has said the same thing. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

With the one-year anniversary of Russia’s Feb.24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine just around the corner, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg this week issued some surprising words regarding the history and origin of the conflict. In essence he finally admitted an important truth, which is of course extremely rare among top Western officials these days.

Whereas prior to these fresh remarks by Stoltenberg, US and NATO officials including major media, have framed the invasion exclusively as merely one man’s (Putin) ‘unprovoked’ naked aggression bent on enlarging an ‘expansionist Russia’, Stoltenberg now much belatedly admits “the war didn’t start in February last year. The war started in 2014.

🇺🇸🇪🇺🇺🇦🇷🇺”NATO has been training the Ukrainian military since 2014, NATO partners have been supplying the Ukrainian armed forces with the necessary weapons and training since 2014″ — Jens Stoltenbergs admits again

“Unprovoked invasion”… pic.twitter.com/Qa8shKSWXx — AZ 🛰🌏🌍🌎 (@AZgeopolitics) February 14, 2023

Here’s what the NATO chief said during a briefing to reporters, and in front of cameras, as also transcribed and published to NATO’s official website

“The other thing I will say is that the war didn’t start in February last year. The war started in 2014. And since 2014, NATO Allies have provided support to Ukraine, with training, with equipment, so the Ukrainian Armed Forces were much stronger in 2022, than they were in 2020, and 2014. And of course, that made a huge difference when President Putin decided to attack Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said.

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The Horrifying Endgame in Ukraine, by James Rickards

The endgame may be nuclear conflagration. From James Rickards at dailyreckoning.com:

In yesterday’s issue, I addressed the biggest and most complex topic on the geopolitical landscape today — China.

But today I’m discussing what is by far the most alarming topic on the geopolitical landscape today. That’s the war in Ukraine and the dangers of escalation.

I’ve written extensively about two facets of the war in Ukraine that you don’t hear from legacy media in the United States or U.K. The first is that Russia is actually winning the war.

U.S. outlets such as The New York Times (a channel for the State Department) and The Washington Post (a channel for the CIA) report endlessly about how Russian plans have failed, about how incompetent they are about how the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have pushed back Russians in the Donbass, and how NATO weapons such as U.S. Abrams tanks, U.K. Challenger tanks and German Leopard tanks will turn the tide against Russia soon.

This is all nonsense. None of it is true.

Reality Check

First off, the Ukrainian advances that took place in late summer were against lightly defended positions that the Russians quickly conceded to conserve forces. The Russians were willing to give up the land so that they wouldn’t lose valuable men and materiel.

The Russians withdrew to more defensible positions and have been badly mauling Ukrainian attacking forces ever since. Ukraine has wasted incredibly large amounts of men and equipment in these futile and ill-advised attacks.

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Implications of US Destruction of Nordstream 2 Pipeline, by Graham E. Fuller

The U.S. government’s desperate quest to maintain the U.S.-led unipolar world order will fail. From Graham E. Fuller at consortiumnews.com:

With a new Great Wall between Russia and the West, Graham E. Fuller wonders what kind of role lies ahead for either the U.S. or Europe on the international scene.

China’s embassy in Berlin, January 2010. (Jochen Teufel, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The disturbing and detailed reportage by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh on Washington’s sabotage of the Russian Nordstream 2 gas pipeline to Germany now provides new perspective on the momentous series of geopolitical trends that began with the war in Ukraine.

My own assessment of the Russian invasion written one year ago offered an analysis that was, and still is, markedly at variance with the Washington-dominated narrative of the course of Ukraine events.

A few thoughts from then:

—I condemned the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, and indeed of any government that launches a war (President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq included).

—My belief that the Russian invasion was nonetheless far from “unprovoked” but rather quite clearly provoked by Washington in its longstanding willful insistence on pushing NATO’s armed alliance ultimately right up to the very borders of Russia, where ancient Kievan/Russian cultural roots are deeply linked with early Russian/Orthodox Slavic civilization.

Yet Washington denies the validity of any Russian “sphere of influence” in Ukraine while the U.S. itself still maintains its own strong sphere of influence throughout Latin America — witness the Cuban missile crisis. (And can you imagine a Chinese military base in Mexico to bolster Mexican sovereignty?)

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A US-Led ‘Coalition of the Willing’ Foreshadows the Splintering of NATO, by Mike Whitney

How long before European countries decide they no longer want to be part of an American empire? The Nord Stream bombings clearly demonstrate the empire has gone off the rails. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:

The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline was a gangster act that reveals the cancer at the heart of the “rules-based order”. How can there be peace and security when the world’s most powerful nation can destroy the critical infrastructure of other countries without deliberation or judicial proceedings? If Hersh’s report can be trusted—and I think it can—then we must assume that senior-level advisors in the Biden administration as well as the president himself deliberately perpetrated an act of industrial terrorism against a long-term friend and ally, Germany. What Biden’s involvement in the act implies, is that the United States now claims the right to arbitrarily decide which countries may engage in commerce with which others. And, if for some reason, the buying and selling of energy supplies conflicts with Washington’s broader geopolitical objectives, then the US believes it has the right to obliterate the infrastructure that makes such trade possible. Isn’t this the rationale that was used to justify the blowing up of Nord Stream?

Sy Hersh has done the world a service by exposing the perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage. His expose not only identifies the people involved but also infers that they should be held accountable for their actions. But while we don’t expect any thorough investigation in the near future, we do think the magnitude of the attack has been a “wake up” call for people who cling to the belief that the Unipolar model can produce morally-acceptable outcomes. What the incident shows is that unilateral action inevitably leads to criminal violence against the weak and defenseless. Biden’s covert operation hurt every man, woman and child in Europe. It’s a real tragedy. Here’s a quote from a recent interview with Hersh:

“I think this story has the same potential for destroying the ability of our president to rally the American people behind the war because it shows something that is so dark and so Unamerican. You know, this isn’t us. We’re not talking about us. This is a bunch of intelligence officers and CIA people….” Seymour Hersh 2:29 min

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War and Indifference, by Andrew P. Napolitano

There’s no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to wage war without a congressional declaration of war on either friend or foe, yet that’s exactly what Biden did when he blew up the Germany and Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Which is more destructive to personal liberty, a government that engages in secret acts of war or a public and news media that are indifferent to it? In the current American toxic stew of anti-Russian hatred and beating the drums of war — in President Joe Biden’s America — we have both.

Here is the backstory.

The war in Ukraine is now in its 12th month. It has become a slow, inexorable movement westward for Russian military forces and painful migrations of 5 million Ukrainians out of their country, to say nothing of the losses of between 130,000 and 150,000 Ukraine troops.

Congress has authorized the president to spend up to $100 billion in borrowed dollars in support of the doomed Ukraine forces. He has thus far wasted about half of that in donated military equipment and cash.

Much of the military equipment has come not from American surplus but from America’s storehouses of equipment for self-defense. And much of the equipment the U.S. has furnished is so sophisticated that Ukraine troops are in Oklahoma learning to use, maintain and repair it. Some is so sophisticated that American troops are on the ground in Ukraine, out of uniform, instructing upon and maintaining the equipment. And some of the equipment requires American soldiers to target Russian troops and dispatch missiles at them.

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“Plug and Play” Guides US Domestic and Foreign Policy – and It’s Not Working, by Karen Kwiatkowski

Plug and play works in the market, but not with government, because government lacks all the market’s feedback loops. From Karen Kwiatkowski at lewrockwell.com:

The Lockheed Martin USN Freedom Class ships, “plug and play” multi-use vessels costing half a billion each – first launched in 2006 – are all being decommissioned.  The weird thing is that one was just delivered less than six months ago, and as of August 2022, Lockheed was sending out the propulsion fixes for the rest of them, presumably to get them to the scrapyards.

This microdot of news flew under my radar, and it confirms what we already know about the US MICIMATT – it’s not just what we do and how we do it, it’s what’s allowed to be talked about.  These ships were all named after major US cities; a couple of mayors reacted with sadness.  Not disgusted at the insanity and waste, or dumfounded by the government process, just sad that a brand new $500 million ship with their town’s name on it is being junked.

“Plug and play,” as transmogrified by the crony capitalists and government bureaucrats, not only doesn’t work – it is a real danger to every American, and by extension the rest of the world.  In the marketplace, plug and play is efficient, flexible, and smart.  Upgrading, fixing, and modifying mission capability of products via open architecture software and hardware makes sense. The market likes the sim card model – rapid recognition and correction of problems, responding to consumer demand for performance, efficiency and cost – these are key to business success.  Plug and play has raised the bar of market performance, along with customer expectations.

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Nord Stream Terror Attack: The Plot Thickens, by Pepe Escobar

Who was Seymour Hersh’s source? From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris.

Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report on how the United States government blew up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea last September continues to generate rippling geopolitical waves all across the spectrum.

Except, of course, in the parallel bubble of U.S. mainstream media, which has totally ignored it, or in a few select cases, decided to shoot the messenger, dismissing Hersh as a “discredited” journalist, a “blogger”, and a “conspiracy theorist”.

I have offered an initial approach, focused on the plentiful merits of a seemingly thorough report, but also noting some serious inconsistencies.

Old school Moscow-based foreign correspondent John Helmer has gone even further; and what he uncovered may be as incandescent as Sy Hersh’s own narrative.

The heart of the matter in Hersh’s report concerns attribution of responsibility for a de facto industrial terror attack. Surprisingly, no CIA; that falls straight on the toxic planning trio of Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland – neoliberal-cons part of the “Biden” combo. And the final green light comes from the Ultimate Decider: the senile, teleprompt-reading President himself. The Norwegians feature as minor helpers.

That poses the first serious problem: nowhere in his narrative Hersh refers to MI6, the Poles (government, Navy), the Danes, and even the German government.

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US Big Defense, the Only Winner of the Ukraine Proxy War, by Dan Steinbock

The big defense and intelligence contractors have been the only consistent winners in the wars the U.S. has fought since World War II. From Dan Steinbock at antiwar.com:

The Unwarranted Ukraine Proxy War: A Year Later

Not only do these global military contractors arm Ukraine, but they stand to benefit from the re-militarization of Western Europe, Japan, and the new NATO members.

To Russia and Ukraine, the crisis is an existential issue. To the US and NATO, it’s a regime-change game. To Europe, it means the demise of stability – in the world economy, lost years (and that’s the benign scenario).

That’s how I characterized the US/NATO-led proxy war against Russia in Ukraine back in early March 2022. I argued that it was an “avoidable war that will penalize severely Ukraine, Russia, the US and the NATO, Europe, developing countries and the global economy.”

At the time, the prediction was seen as contrarian. But it has prevailed. However, on January 25 the Ukraine proxy war entered a new, still more dangerous phase. The commitment of some 70 US, German, UK and Polish battle tanks herald lethal escalation, although hundreds more are needed to defeat Russia.

Not only will economic and human costs climb even further, but strategic risks, including the potential of nuclear confrontation, will soar. With such escalation in high-tech arms sales to Ukraine, regional and military spillovers are a matter of time.

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